If you are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.

The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.

There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.

Violent clashes between adherents of different religions, and just as much between supporters of competing creeds within the same religion, have been a regular occurrence for well over a thousand years.

All of the world’s major belief systems are culpable, to the point where none has a meaningful claim to be more pacifistic than the next. You can more or less pick any combination at random, and find a bust up.

Catholics versus Protestants, Maronites versus Shias, Sunnis versus Shias, and even three-way Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim conflicts; there are many parts of the world where theological errancy comes with a price tag attached.

Numerous responses are available to thinking people. A range of internally consistent off-the-shelf theodicies are on offer, from St Augustine to Alvin Plantinga. Marxists stress that all religious doctrines are ultimately ideological refractions of class interest.

On the other hand, mainstream liberal atheists often intellectually limit themselves to the overly-simplistic assertion that ‘religion poisons everything’.

Many on both left and right will explain what occurred in Jos by reference to local disputes over land, thanks to a system whereby Hausa Muslims are classified as settlers rather than indigenes and therefore discriminated against.

My one brief visit to Nigeria was confined to Lagos. I have no expert opinion on the specificities of the latest round of fighting, although materialist accounts obviously make the most intuitive sense.

But at the very least, religion is once again seen to be perpetuating divisions that would be sooner healed without its baleful influence complicating the Nigerian political process.

This brings me back to the tell-tale giveaway mark of totalitarian secular fundamentalists everywhere, namely our support for the separation of church and state. The less input religion has into politics, the better things are for everybody, including believers themselves.

This idea is rooted in Locke’s observations of the sometimes bloody tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism in seventeenth century Britain, and typically comes in a buy one, get one free package deal with freedom of religion. There is simply no other way forward in the multifaith society.

Those countries where the principle obtains, even as incompletely as it does in the UK, are manifestly the better for it. What happened in Jos last weekend is a timely reminder of the default setting.

Interesting post. The question is what kind of secularism you are going for. Freedom FROM religion, or freedom OF religion. Locke was definitely of the latter, being a devout Christian himself. I think just about everyone can get behind that.

Freedom from religion, on the other hand, implies a need to emancipate people from their ‘irrational’ religious beliefs, basically to turn them into humanists or athiests. Dawkinites sometimes seem to move into this territory. And this, I think is not so tenable. Essentially, I don’t see societies that lack personal religious believers being any more or less likely to break out in violence than religious ones, or even more or less tolerant.

What you dislike is when the religious go schizo and murder ‘enemies’ they believe are defined in their books, an attitude you will find which is shared among the religious.

The secular do have a kind of fundamentalism, and I’ve touched upon how this works on these very pages [http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/02/13/a-model-for-christian-atheism/]. Richard Dawkins might be a bad example, because he is ever so meek and mild mannered, but there are among the new atheist numbers a cohort who you could describe as violent (Sam Harris justifies torture in his book The End of Faith) and those people could do as much harm (Lenin excusing the burning down of churches was done on the premise that religion is an ideological enemy to secular Soviet communism, Nazism was supposedly predicated on a type of cod-Christian anti-Semitism that bought into the blood libel – these things are fundamentalist secularism).

Now of course the new atheist lot don’t cite support for Lenin, or Eichmann because they say that their motives are based on a pseudo-religious, or grand narrative based theory – which of course is a kop-out. They trip over themselves to say Stalin’s death squads were a product of orthodox law, and they needn’t; they could accept that theists and atheists are both equally as capable of doing stupid things, saying stupid things, holding beliefs which are predicated on stupidity (Darwin was a non-believer because his daughter died, not because his theory taught him this and that about whether or not there was a God, Francis Collins became a believer when he saw a frozen waterfall; both stupid reasons to believe or disbelieve in a God) and most important of all theists and atheists alike are both capable of doing violent things to one another in the name of whatever stupid theory they have that day.

What happened in Nigeria is tragic; but lets not delude ourselves into thinking that a wholesale move from whackyness to liberal secularism in Nigeria will change the face of that country, it just moves the terms of those actions.

‘They trip over themselves to say Stalin’s death squads were a product of orthodox law’

They also miss out on the fact that Stalinism and its local variants crossed cultural and religious borders. It had no intrinsic religious basis and found support in a number of different places, from Korea to Cuba. This sort of mass violence was something quite new and relatively distinct from religious ideologies.

‘This brings me back to the tell-tale giveaway mark of totalitarian secular fundamentalists everywhere, namely our support for the separation of church and state. The less input religion has into politics, the better things are for everybody, including believers themselves.’

Yes…and no. I agree that the state should be secular, i.e., that it should show no favouritism to any citizen based on their religious belief (or lack thereof) and that this requires a strict separation of church and state, of religious and specifically civic reasoning. The current battle around allowing religious groups who wish to register civil partnerships on their premises is really a battle to disestablish a specific Anglican theology of marriage/civil partnership and make the state neutral on this issue – a battle for secularism.

That said, I would not go so far as to say that religion should have no ‘input into politics’. In some cases, people with religious convictions can, precisely in virtue of these convictions, be particularly well motivated to promote the sort of things that a just secular state should promote. Think of London Citizens. London Citizens is not specifically religious, but many of its member organizations are. And it seems to me to be doing a much better job of articulating a justice-based critique of contemporary British capitalism than any non-religious organization on the political left.

As with many posts on this sort of issue at Liberal Conspiracy, I sense a rather one-dimensional picture of ‘religion’ lurking in the background here.

Religion simply provided the basis on which to identify each group. It could easily have been another factor such as tribe, ethnic group, football club. The root cause of these killings is in the arbitrary discrimination between groups. It could happen anywhere.

‘Nazism was supposedly predicated on a type of cod-Christian anti-Semitism that bought into the blood libel – these things are fundamentalist secularism’

Bullshit. The Nazis didn’t invent anti-semitism, they tapped into a thousand years of Jew-hatred promoted by Catholics and, later, Protestants. Hitler refered to himself as a Catholic, he made speeches which addressed Catholics directly and the only Nazi ex-communicated by the Catholic church was booted out got marrying a divorcee.

shatterface, ffs read what I’ve written and then comment, and that goes for my LC posts as well, I haven’t said that the Nazis invented anti-Semitism, I’m saying that there modus operandi was predicated on cod-Christian anti-Semitism. And incidentally, before 1937 (I believe) the nazi party discouraged religious membership on the grounds that it was ideology, Hitler started making religious-esque remarks and defined himself in relation to Catholicism at a similar time period that Catholic anti-Semites started to throw money in his direction, I’d recommend David Cesarani’s book on Eichmann for details on the Nazi’s love/hate relationship with religion and their sea-change before and after huge greats wads of Catholic cash. In the mean time, please shh

‘I haven’t said that the Nazis invented anti-Semitism, I’m saying that there modus operandi was predicated on cod-Christian anti-Semitism’

Maybe you define what the fuck you mean by ‘cod-Christian anti-Semitism’ because if you simply mean the Nazis were aping Christians then I don’t see how that aids YOUR argument that they were secular.

‘Hitler started making religious-esque remarks and defined himself in relation to Catholicism at a similar time period that Catholic anti-Semites started to throw money in his direction’

Precisely what I said: that anti-Semitism was rife among German Christians PRIOR to the Nazis and that the Nazis simply cashed in on it. Anti-semitism was not the invention of any secular group so not only does your argument collapse at the first Godwin hurdle but it contradicts itself.

(And for the second time this year we get someone linking atheists with Eichmann….)

“Many on both left and right will explain what occurred in Jos by reference to local disputes over land, thanks to a system whereby Hausa Muslims are classified as settlers rather than indigenes and therefore discriminated against.”

Quite. And perhaps the most important word there is “Hausa”. Very little makes sense in Nigeria (the politics least of all) without taking account of tribal interests…Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Ijaw and so on.

“Muslim” here is more a marker of being Hausa than it is specifically about religion.

Here are four theses, all of which strike me as so obviously true as not to be worth arguing about:

(1) People with religious views are entirely capable of horrific acts.

(2) People with no religious views, or anti-religious views, are entirely capable of horrific acts.

(3) People with religious views are entirely capable of wonderful acts of human compassion and kindness – and in some cases they are so motivated by their religious views.

(4) People with no religious views or who despise religion are entirely capable of wonderful acts of compassion and kindness.

Right, so where does that leave us? Possibly looking for a more fruitful angle on the discussion of secularism?

The idea that the case for a secular state rests on the unique or distinctive wickedness of religion in political life is far too crude and simplistic. Its about finding a fair way of living with pluralism.

no shatterface, that is me, you said on the comments thread of my last post on here about charity ‘now they use zizek’ it is all me, I also wrote the post on here about John Gray, it was me, and you haven’t yet disuaded me from doing so. Why is it that you don’t want Eichmann to be an atheist so much? He was as far as I know undecided about God, but thoroughly anti-Christian, and if you hold such strong opinions you’d allow yourself to be challenged by the book I’ve recommended above.

What I said does not collapse in on itself, I have made no mention of secularism creating anti-Semitism. There was financial gain to be made from appealing to Catholics (who instigated this, Catholic groups approached the Nazi’s, the Nazi’s were at this time anti-religious institutions). The Nazi’s ideas were not Christian ideas (thus cod-Christian), Nazi state was not a religious state, it wasn’t theocratic, it was born out of a non-religious, in some respects anti-religious hatred of certain racial groups based and practiced on an extreme version of racial social Darwinism. They duped the religious far right for cash.

BBC in 2003: “sporadic outbreaks of violence related to the introduction of Islamic criminal punishments across northern Nigeria. In the worst such incident in the city of Kaduna three years ago, more than 2,000 people died in street protests eventually brought under control by the army”

2007 “Kano state bans all films from carrying music”

Shehu sani case:
“a case brought against Shehu Sani – a well-known human rights activist, social critic and author. Sani – a practicing Muslim – was prosecuted by a group called Concerned Sharia Forum over a satirical play, Phantom Crescent, he wrote exposing the abuses and double standards by those implementing Sharia law in 12 states in Northern Nigeria….Shehu Sani said he wants to use the play to enlighten the local population as to how Sharia is being used to oppress them. And practically speaking, this is a tall order, which is likely get him into trouble with the Islamic theocrats and jihadists who do not tolerate any form of ‘enlightenment’ that is critical of Islam.”

“One of the ways Islamic fundamentalists have demonstrated their moral backwardness and ignorance is through gross human rights violations. Islam is inherently opposed to human dignity and equality, gender equity and justice.

“According to Mr Sani, the play dramatises the human rights violations perpetrated against women and poor people by the Hisbah. Hisbah is a bunch of jihadists masquerading as Sharia police or enforcers, funded with state money.

“Since independence, thousands – tens of thousands – of Nigerians have lost their live to religious bloodletting in Nigeria. In March this year(2007) , a Christian school teacher from Southern Nigeria was lynched by Muslim pupils for allegedly desecrating the Koran. And last month, Islamic Jihadists attacked and killed at least 9 Christians and burnt several churches in Kano- a Sharia implementing state and an Islamic stronghold. In 2000, sharia riots across Nigeria claimed thousands of lives.

2009 – The Guardian
“Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s president, has been at pains to play down the long-term implications of this week’s lethal clashes between security forces and radical Islamists across several northern states. But his hurried reassurances, offered as he boarded a plane to Brazil, were not wholly convincing given the apparent spread of hardline Wahhabi or Salafi doctrines in Muslim areas in recent years, the large numbers of militants involved, and repeated warnings about possible links to al-Qaida.

“In 2003, Osama bin Laden singled out Nigeria as an area of special interest for al-Qaida’s destabilisation agenda and the following year the so-called Nigerian Taliban first emerged, although it had no known direct links to the Afghan and Pakistani varieties.

“In a later interview with the BBC, Mohammad Yusuf, Boko Haram’s enigmatic leader, said he believed western-style education was contrary to Islam and “spoils the belief in one God”. Yusuf went on: “Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain. Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We also reject the theory of Darwinism.”

BBC
Islamist militants have staged three co-ordinated attacks in northern Nigeria leaving dozens dead, meaning about 150 have been killed in two days.
A BBC reporter has counted 100 bodies, mostly of militants, near the police headquarters in Maiduguri, Borno State, where hundreds are fleeing their homes.
Witnesses told the BBC a gun battle raged for hours in Potiskum, Yobe State and a police station was set on fire.
Some of the militants follow a preacher who campaigns against Western schools.
The preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, says Western education is against Islamic teaching.

And specific to the clashes you raised Dave:
==============================

Human Rights Watch:
“Arbitrary Killings by Security Forces in Jos
“Nigerian police and army forces were implicated in more than 90 arbitrary killings in responding to inter-communal violence between Christian and Muslim mobs in Jos, Nigeria, on November 28 and 29, 2008, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called on the Nigerian government to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the killings, mostly of young Muslim men from the Hausa-Fulani ethnic group.

BBC
Islamist militants have staged three co-ordinated attacks in northern Nigeria leaving dozens dead, meaning about 150 have been killed in two days.
A BBC reporter has counted 100 bodies, mostly of militants, near the police headquarters in Maiduguri, Borno State, where hundreds are fleeing their homes.
Witnesses told the BBC a gun battle raged for hours in Potiskum, Yobe State and a police station was set on fire.
Some of the militants follow a preacher who campaigns against Western schools.
The preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, says Western education is against Islamic teaching.

Barnabus Fund
“Large-scale anti-Christian violence flares up regularly in certain Nigerian states, though in this most recent violence it seems that the police were intended as targets as well as the Christians.
“Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, International Director of Barnabas Fund, says, “Our Christian brothers and sisters in Northern Nigeria are repeatedly the victims of mass violence, with churches burnt and people killed, just as we have seen again in the last few days. All too often, as in this case, it is apparent that the attacks have been well planned and orchestrated. Please pray for peace and stability in this part of Nigeria, also for freedom and justice for its Christian minority, which suffers much in the states where full sharia is in force. Pray that Christians will not retaliate.”

Were the BBC wrong to report: “sporadic outbreaks of violence related to the introduction of Islamic criminal punishments across northern Nigeria. In the worst such incident in the city of Kaduna three years ago, more than 2,000 people died in street protests”

I feel I should point out some blatant Islamaphobia on the BBC as well. Question Time last week was from the London Muslim Centre in Whitechapel. In order to promote that vicious old stereotype of Muslims that they are easily angered, excitable and shout a lot, the BBC repeatedly dubbed on some canned shouting, whistling and catcalling, which I found very offensive. I’ve seen the same tactic used in QT programmes broadcast from solid white Middle England, where they try to promote the stereotype that middle-class English people are restrained and reasonable, in which case they dub on subdued quiet applause, and occasionally, canned silence. I’ve complained about it.

You will note that there is not a lot of religion on that list (let’s assume that the Marxist-Leninist religion wasn’t responsible for the crimes against humanity of Mao and Stalin). People do bad things to each other, and evolutionary biology – normally the Bible of 21st century atheists – suggests that ethnic divisions in competition for resources explain why that happens. But the new atheists are quite content to substitute correlation for causation when it is convenient, and so we get facile analyses like ascribing the Northern Ireland conflict to Catholics fighting Protestants over religion. I submit that the same is likely true for the situation in Nigeria; religion correlates with ethnicity, but the atheists prefer to play fast and loose with the causation.

“Ah there’s a suprise. Just Visiting pops up to blame the whole thing on muslims”

Who’s asking you for a permission slip?
So,we should leave it in your neutral,unbiased ,non-judgemental superior hands to save the world from any threat–foreign or domestic.
You’ll know exactly when to react,how to react and with that perfect symmetry of porportionate fairness.It must be some kind of hereditary talent that us lesser humans are incapable of.
That moral—-“Goldilocks-Zone”—-neither too hot,nor too cold,but just right.
Some times I wonder who’s doing the “popping up”–here RWF.

Or maybe it was just your way of saying–“shut-up”.

One last question:
When you say “blame it all on the muslims”.—do you mean just Nigeria–or would that included,Algeria,Egypt,Palestein,Lebanon,Iraq,Iran,Kenya,Somalia,Yemen,Saudi Arabia,Pakistan,Kashmir,Mayalasia,Phillipines,Thailand,Chechnya,Indonesia
Sweden,Norway,Denmark,Netherlands,France,Greece and Britain (have I forgotten somewhere?)

You’re not interested in finding the truth RWF.You’re only interested in your religion-“anti-racism”.The be and end all–of all things.

I note that the massacre of Christians in Nigeria appears to be “a political football” in this place.

Firstly, unless you have lived under Islamic Sharia law then you would have little understanding of what this means.

It means that conversion from Islam is punishable by death and that women can be stoned to death for adultery.

This massacre killed innocents and the majority of innocents in this attack were young children and mothers.

If the author of the original post deems himself to be enlightened, then clearly he is barking up the wrong tree because he does not show a lot of care about the innocents who were massacred – no, instead he wants to make political gain out of this tragic event.

It is crazy to suggest that the bloodbath will stop, or even be ameliorated, if religion could somehow magically be removed from the human condition.
If everybody finally recognised religion for the sham it is then they would simply invent a new set of grievances and complaints that necessitated extreme forms of action.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4

This commentator states, and perhaps we might think of Iraq as a typical example since it certainly seems to meet most of the criteria;
*Most of the violence has been committed by “governments.”
*Most of the violence committed by “governments” has been against innocent,
non-combatant civilians.
*Most of the violence committed by “governments” against innocent, non-
combatant civilians has been against “their own” citizens, not external
“enemies.”http://vftonline.org/XianAnarch/pacifism/rummel.htm

The same source claims;
“We’re confident that an average of 10,000 people have been murdered by governments every single day (on average) during the 20th century”.

Are these numbers pie-in-the-sky? – I have no idea, but I’ll bet the of deaths driven by secular causes outweigh those spurred on by the sky fairies?

The original write up here is apt. Government in Plateau State is capitalizing on religion to hide its incompetence. asssuming the so called indigenous people are empowered educationally and economically by the governement which claimed to be their messiah, why would they bother that so called non indigenes are controlling everything which they luckily owned through hardwork and ingenuity?

No, unless he said there was something inherent in the American psyche or way of life that motivated them to bomb Afghans. He talks about Muslims butchering Christians as if we’ve never seen one group of people butcher another despite belonging to the same religion, or to none at all.

Nick @2: surely freedom FROM religion is a more fundamental right than freedom OF religion; I need to be free from having you impose your set of doctrines upon me in order to be free to follow my own, no?

He talks about Muslims butchering Christians as if we’ve never seen one group of people butcher another despite belonging to the same religion, or to none at all.

I’m not sure that he does…

The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year.

I’d like to pick up on this: “unless he said there was something inherent in the American psyche or way of life“. I don’t think there is, but I nor do I think that there’s something inherently rotten to attributing actions to a national consciousness. Hitler’s Willing Executioners – right or wrong – wasn’t dismissed on such grounds.

It cannot be denied that the “religions” of the world have perpetrated incalculable atrocities on the world and their fellow men …. but with all your talk about freedom from or of religion lets not confuse true “Christianity” with those organized “religions” ….most particularly with Catholicism or Islam. If you will but read the New Testament you will find that Christianity, a true faith in and relationship with the one and only Living God, evidenced by “love” and not hate …
bears no resemblance to either of those “religions” or to the violence spawned by them. Catholicism …a system designed and maintained by phenomenally corrupt and degenerate political and financial power brokers to enslve the masses while enriching their own coffers and positioning themselves to rule the world …. so successfully hijacked Christianity for centuries that it’s still commonplace to refer to the Catholic Church as a Christian organization …..again, just read the New Testament and their glaring divergence from the truths and the walk that Jesus preached and demonstrated becomes painfully clear. Among other things they pray to other gods, namely Mary and “church” appointed saints, they SELL indulgences and masses that erroneously and falsely claim to help the deceased reach heaven, they “forgive” sins when Christ Himself said that the only salvation from sins is through believing on Him, they set up the office of the pagan pseudo god the “pope” through whom supposedfly all truth flows, they claim the :pope” is infallible (like God) which in itelf is raving egotistical heresy (and ironically each pope contradicts the last) and their entire cult was founded by the most degenerate bunch of power hungry bozos that ever graced the planet. The fact that the entire Muslim religion was birthed by a bloodthirsty butcher with a penchant for little girls and worshiped a pagan god from Ninevah called Allah (yes, Allah has no relationship or resemblance to the christian God … all the courts in the world could rule otherwise and it would never make the two one) and teaches death to all and any that don’t bow to their pagan god speaks for itself.

And even given that I along with all the rest of you writing here don’t know all the details of the massacre that just occurred in Nigeria, it is a verifiable fact that fundamental Muslims, if they have obtained a substantial portion of the citizenry of an area or country, with few exceptions slaughter Christians wherever and whenever they find them. It’s a tenant of their faith to kill anyone who refuses to convert to Islam, even and perhaps most especially their own people. Again ….historically that is exactly how Islam gained a foothold in the hearts and minds of men, through intimidation and violence and eradicating all opposition. Rather reminds me of Catholicism in by gone centuries ….and even though the Catholic church for now is behaving somewhat civilly I’m certain the mask will drop and we’ll see their true colors if they ever obtain world dominion over religion once again or find a world wide tyrant to finance.

[…] Alpha wrote a very interesting post today. Here’s a quick excerpt:And it seems to me to be doing a much better job of articulating a justice-based critique of contemporary British capitalism than any non-religious organization on the political left. As with many posts on this sort of issue at Liberal … […]